UPDATE: Benson attorney general website attacked
by Dara Kam | August 24th, 2010
Apologies to Sean Doughtie, Holly Benson’s web master, who corrected our use of the term “hacked” to describe an attack on the attorney general candidate’s website.
The site was not hacked, which means the culprits did not gain access to the server, Doughtie, owner of Taproot Creative, clarified.
What happened was in the geek world called a “brute force attack,” Doughtie explained, designed to either shut the website down or hack into it. Neither happened, Doughtie said.
“They basically just jammed up the server so the server slowed down a crawl,” he said.
The attack came from Tallahassee, a source close to Benson’s campaign said, and Doughtie’s busy trying to identify who was behind the dirty deed.
GOP attorney general candidate Holly Benson’s website crashed last night after being hacked, her campaign said.
The attack on the eve before today’s primary election did not result in any security breach, according to her website consultant.
“Yesterday, Hollybenson.com was the victim of a brute force attack where one or more individuals attempted to overload the server with the purpose of taking it offline. We quickly identified the issue, narrowed the source of the attack, and were able to restore access with little downtime. At no time was the security of the website breached, and no information was compromised. We are conducting an ongoing investigation with regard to the source and the intent of the attack on the website,” Sean Doughtie, Benson’s new media campaign consultant, said.
Tags: 2010 campaigns, 2010 elections, attorney general, Holly Benson, Sean Doughtie
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August 24th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Kottkamp’s website was also hacked a couple of weeks ago and his and his wife’s personal email accts were hacked. Those people have no shame.
August 24th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
The person/people responsible will turn out to be liberals who wanted to ruin a campaign. Just like David Kernell, the college student & son of an elected Tennessee Democrat who hacked Sarah Palin’s e-mails. Dishonesty comes easy for these people.
August 25th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
You still got it wrong. This was not a “brute force attack” that term is reserved for basically guessing password by trying all possible letter/number combinations until one works. What happened here was a Denial of Service attack. the website was flooded with so much traffic that it could not respond to legitimate requests.
Damn, people, if you don;t understand the technology then don’t report on it, or at least find someone who does know.
- Pr0
August 27th, 2010 at 9:26 am
I bookmarked this post on digg and reddit by the way. I think people really need to read this.